Third-party developers have created more than 13,000 apps to harness API data from Strava, the social network for runners, cyclists, and other athletes, but one app is apparently better than all the rest.

It's called PaceMatch, and its ambitious goal is to classify every runner using Strava into categories based on the ultimate differentiator in running: speed. Created by a programmer in Marin County, Calif., in her spare time, PaceMatch last week was crowned the winner of Strava's developer competition.

The competition offered PaceMatch's creator, Becky Jaimes, a relatively ho-hum grand prize: a Garmin Edge bike computer, a one-year premium Strava subscription, and a few other sundries. But as much as it was a low-stakes contest for developers, it was also a way for Strava to highlight the massive growth of its API over the past two years. That growth is a byproduct of—or perhaps a catalyst for—the wearables-fueled fitness craze. Or maybe it is simply the result of fitness enthusiasts' propensity to seek out other enthusiasts with whom to boast about their fitness achievements.

Whatever the case, one thing was clear to Strava CEO and co-founder Mark Gainey: with more than 100 new apps pulling data from Strava's API every week, the company must be doing something right.

When Strava launched its API two years ago, "we knew that there were a lot of ideas" from developers, Gainey said recently in an interview at the company's San Francisco headquarters. But he initially viewed the API as little more than a way to make it easier for fitness tracker manufacturers to access the data that Strava records.

Indeed, half of Strava's appeal is that it is a streamlined way to pull data from nearly every mainstream fitness wearable. Its other hook is its social network, which ranks runners and cyclists who traverse the same routes, offering video-game-like leaderboards.

To the surprise of Mark and Mateo Ortega, who's in charge of Strava's device integrations, the API turned out to be just as useful for the social-networking aspect of Strava as for its compatibility with trackers.

"Week after week, new stuff comes in," Ortega said. Within two years of offering an API, more than 10,000 developers had taken advantage of it. Apps spread largely by word of mouth, with some of the more popular ones gaining a following on Strava's own social network and, of course, Reddit.

The developer competition was therefore a way to "highlight the cream of the crop," as Gainey put it. While RunKeeper, one of the company's chief competitors, spun off its proprietary API into a separate unit called HealthGraph five years ago, Strava has kept its API open source and available on GitHub. The result is a vast nerdy playground that pleased developers but made it somewhat difficult to find good apps.

In fact, in that sense the API mirrors the Strava community as a whole, Jaimes thought.

"There's so many people," she said in a recent interview. (Strava does not provide a figure for its monthly active users, but noted that more than 75 percent are outside the US.) "It's such a big network. I think that the piece missing was, 'Okay, I'm in the area, who should I connect with?'"

Tinder's answer to that question would be to show you potential matches based on compatibilities in your profiles, but Jaimes realized the Strava API offered a better way: speed. If you're looking for a running buddy, it matters little who the person is as long as they can keep up with you and they live nearby.

So Jaimes, who had quit her analytics job at a Silicon Valley startup to give birth to her first child, spent a bit of her free time tinkering with what she called a "beautiful" API with "tons of random information." The result was PaceMatch, which finds all the Strava users who have run the same courses you have with a similar pace.

It's easy to see why Strava picked it as a winner: the model is nearly identical to Strava's core social networking tool, which ranks you against all the other users who have completed the same courses you have. The chief difference is that PaceMatch matches you up with the users who would be your most likely running companions based on their pace.

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Jaimes says PaceMatch currently has around 200 users, but she expects that number to take off now that it's been crowned the best Strava API integration. As more people sign up, she'll fine tune her algorithms that weed out outliers—the marathon champion who ran once or twice on your usual 3-mile circuit while she was recovering from an injury, for instance.

While Strava may be beloved by its community of developers and athletes, it is far from the Facebook of fitness: in addition to RunKeeper, its competitors include Map My Run, Cyclemeter, Endomo and a host of other apps that offer similar features. So hosting a developer challenge is a logical way to highlight the strength of its community. It complements Strava's other recent stunts, like giving away free shoes to people who record negative splits (running the second half of the race faster than the first).

Ultimately, social-networking apps that cater to a single community rise and fall with the offline strength of that community. Strava appears to have put its finger on its community's sweet spot: runners and cyclists are not only sociable offline, but they're also data lovers and prolific coders.

About the Author

As a hardware analyst, Tom tests and reviews laptops, peripherals, and much more at PC Labs in New York City. He previously covered the consumer tech beat as a news reporter for PCMag in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where he rode in several self-driving cars and witnessed the rise and fall of many startups. Before that, he worked for PCMag's s... See Full Bio

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